I thought The Strangers was really really good. I like watching horror movies but I also have a hard time with them because I'm not into super gorey stuff or supernatural stuff. Plus a lot of them are super predictable and just kind of lame in general. I like the sensation of feeling scared, and movies that do that to me best are movies that are realistic, where I'm sitting there thinking "holy shit, I could see this happening". I think The Strangers is probably the movie from the past 10 years that has scared me the most because of that element.

Funny Games would probably do it for me too, I just haven't worked up the nerve to watch it yet, but I've read a lot about it.

It's the nihilism in Funny Games that really gets under your skin. There's plenty of abrupt violence too - but it's the casual attitude of the killers and the sheer random senselessness of what happens that really gives the film its edge. Balv is spot on - Haneke is basically saying people suck - including the film's audience, who after all, are paying money to watch mindless violence. Either version is worth watching - same director and the US remake is basically a scene by scene copy of the original anyway.

"As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody who didn't live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors on the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses."

In interviews, Bertino stated he was "very impressed" with some of the theories circulating on the Internet about the "true events" the movie is allegedly based on, but said that his main inspiration was the true crime book Helter Skelter about the Manson Family murders; some have said that the film was also inspired by the unsolved Keddie Cabin Murders of 1981 that occurred in a small vacation community in California's Sierra Nevada. The film's premise has been compared by some film critics to the French horror film Them, released two years earlier.

I had heard this. That movie creeped me out so bad when I watched it that I ended up reading everything I could about it. I'm also a pretty avid true crime reader and have read about the Keddie Cabin Murders a few times and have heard them covered in a couple of my podcasts. That event is probably in my top 5 favorite unsolved murders to read about when I want to creep myself out (Zodiac has and probably always will be number 1).

finchers film is incredible - the documentary included with the directors cut is nothing short of chilling - im legit shocked that hes never been caught

read an interview with john carroll lynch recently and he talked about his take on it:

AVC: First thing’s first. Is Arthur Leigh Allen the Zodiac Killer?

JCL: No, and the reason I don’t think so is twofold. First, in performing the role, David Fincher asked me to play it as an innocent man. [Pauses.] Until the end. [Laughs.]

AVC: Until that last scene with Robert Graysmith.

JCL: And then the other thing was… and this is going to sound like a weird defense, but… Arthur Leigh Allen was a pedophile. To get to be a pedophile, to really choose to do that, consciously in your life, it’s my belief that you have to run through some really severe walls of societal norms and morals. It has to be a mania, an obsession, of such grand proportions for you to ignore the health and safety of children to do it—I don’t see how you go, “I want to sleep with children and kill people.” The only way I can think of it not being that way is if he molested children—[Aside.] this is a horrible answer—and he realized that wasn’t it. He just thought it was. But I find that hard to believe. Now, that’s a terrible defense of Arthur Leigh Allen. He wasn’t the Zodiac Killer, he wasn’t a serial killer, because he was a pedophile. But I will say that the circumstantial evidence that Graysmith presented, and that David Fincher expanded upon during the making of the movie, is pretty overwhelming.

AVC: But there have been so many suspects over the years. People have made these iron, convincing cases against several people.

JCL: Sure. That’s what the movie’s about, isn’t it? I think that movie is about the virus of obsession. And I don’t think that’s stopped. The Zodiac isn’t the first one to do that, obviously.

As a horror movie fan, I can suggest "The Conjuring" One of the best movies in the horror genre ever. It's about paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren work to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in their farmhouse.